Ahh, the world of blogging, bane of the literary world, a proliferation of misinformed amateurs misconstruing the proper sequences and structures of what there is to know and express professionally in an orderly manner, a free-for-all dragging down of the time-honored traditions and standards of decency and quality. What random thoughts have occurred to you as you went out like Melville trying to not knock hats off but rather to jog idly through the spring woods that you feel compelled to share with us, oh immortal oracle of Delphic cyber obscurity and utter baloney?

Well, since you have chanted so, piously calling forth the blogging gods, yes, I did have a few things on my mind, I mean, if there is such a thing as a mind, or rather if this illusion of mind has much significance compared with the Eternal Mind of transcendental perceptions.

As I finally got out of the house, after the usual week of keeping bar and staying out or up too late, after yoga, heading out for the first attempt at a run since running on pavement back when the first blizzard hit, I began to wonder, how an author could stand giving a reading. It's a common practice. Actually we did it up at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and it was kind of fun. That there are such things as writing classes says, I suppose, something positive about the general public who, in an imaginary world, would attend the reading you would do out at some hypothetical book store somewhere with a small awkward crowd of listeners seeking in some way to gain and benefit from going out to a book store, either socially or intellectually or curiously.

Hemingway was an awkward reader of his own stuff. It would come out sounding stiff and flat. Maybe because so much of his stuff is about summarizing all the myriad thoughts that come streaming through our heads, a great reduction. Reading him, we get the vast rush of thoughts that flavor the brusk sentences. We understand a million unspoken things captured in his shorthand as one of his narrators looks at something and describes it. But, to read aloud from our own thought processes would be equally as strange. Maybe old Ernie was just good at being unbalanced in a balanced judicious clear way put down in elegantly simple sentences that convey actually being there.

Kerouac got nervous, but he was able to get over it. Sometimes, obviously, he drank to get through these things. But moreso, he could take comfort with delivering a passage full of life and stuff going on with windy musicality, a run-on of words that was pleasant and stimulating to say out loud like a new-found kick.

Like Hemingway, maybe moreso, Kerouac was athletic. A football player. (He could have played Lou Gehrig in a movie, though of course God left that to Gary Cooper, rightly so.) Which speaks of self-confidence, the willingness to go and feel capable of doing something without a lot of navel-staring and hesitation. 'Dumb jocks,' the skinny egg-head regards them, soon to find himself quite surprised by the depths of gift and personality and wisdom. (A lesson learned in the restaurant business, along with everywhere else.) Or maybe it's just that athletes have good blood flow, good humor.

What does it take for someone--what would it take for you?--to feel like he or she truly is an author, someone who deserves a chair or stool at the front of the room and listening ears? What out of all the stuff you had written would you feel in particular was worth reading out loud, a passage better, more to the point, more stimulating for reader interest? Would it be a passage of a fellow wrongly accused? Would it be a passage that explained that everything we do here in our manifested bodily incarnated lives is the expression of the cosmic love within, such as going out into the woods and seeing a stream?

My guess is that a fine writer is simply one who goes and does it, no big deal, just the way it is, therapeutic, an attempt to explain what it is, what it's all about, on small level and larger. To write is a random occurrence, just an expression exercise. "Now you want me to come out and read in front of people? What makes my book any better, now that I've gotten over all the long years of external beliefs that my book isn't as good, isn't as professional, as tightly edited and non-nonsensical as it should be?, is really a piece of crap."

Why? What makes anyone a writer? Is it the talent of being able to make a fool out of yourself without too much fear, when there are exactly such fears? And, on the other hand, what makes any judgment, be it of an established literary critic or journal, or even bestseller list, or stamp of marketplace of book convention, valid once we've gotten past certain basics?

Kerouac--here I go off on yet another tangent--tried to translate Buddhist thought into the daily lives of the culture he directly experienced. Maybe like the movies of his day, prone to overstatement and obviousness and being kind of hokey, some of his efforts were a bit clichéd, like going off to a mountaintop with his notebooks and canned food, employed as a fire look-out. Does a Buddhist really need to do such things? On the other hand, there is an honesty, a sincerity, a devotional practice to his efforts, and he did his homework, and his fair share of meditating under the stars. All of which should be dearly respected. In his writing practices, he comes as close as any Westerner can come. That, one might believe, shows us that it is worthwhile to, if we can bring ourselves to enjoy it, read Kerouac and regard him as a writer, someone you wouldn't mind going down to the corner bookstore and listen to, even if he's not more fantastically clever than anyone else including your own regarded self.

Blogging would have been truly unimaginable in the 50s, at least if you travelled in decent respectable circles.

But what you find, reading any writer of note, is that we lead oddly similar and related lives. Kerouac had a car accident when he was young, and never really wanted to drive afterward. Like the rest of us, he suffered a nervous breakdown, in his case while in the Armed Services. He was just brave enough to go and fall apart, lie less about it, as a step along the path of sharing really and truly what we all have in common.

Remember, the human being is a wild animal. Let's try at least to be kind to him, to humor him, to read him occasionally without throwing up, but to the contrary, granting him a certain wild dignity best left to savor without much explanation beyond what he himself admitted.